Abstract

Artificial collectives are systems composed of multiple autonomous information or software agents, mobile robots, or nodes in a sensor or communication network. In the future, such systems will be responsible for many important tasks, such as highway traffic control, disaster response, toxic spill monitoring and cleanup, and exploration of other planets. Because such systems will have to function in environments with unreliable communication channels, where agents are likely to fail, they will have to be reliable, scalable, robust, adaptable, and amenable to quantitative mathematical analysis. The last property is important because analysis is crucial to understanding the issues of the design, control, adaptability, and dynamics of collective behavior. We describe two approaches to distributed control of artificial collectives and study them quantitatively. The first, biologically based control, relies on local …

Date

October 31, 2025

Authors

Kristina Lerman, Aram Galstyan

Book

Collectives and the design of complex systems

Pages

231-256

Publisher

Springer New York